Sporemageddon is an interesting series closer to the author‘s Lever Action novel in tone than their more comedic works. A nature-themed revenge story with a protagonist that’s neither a simple murderhobo nor righteous avenger but something more in-between.
The first two novels are mostly concerned with her growth into someone willing to bring the fight to the industrialists. The third (which requires jumping over to the webnovel version or picking up the audiobook) is completely different in being almost entirely set within a dungeon, and while the actual sporemageddon is rather anti-climatic the journey is decent enough. The series then completely shifts gears again in the fourth to feature, of all things, a baffling academy arc, before heading back to the slums in the fifth. So far the fifth seems more like the first two, so I’m cautiously optimistic for future developments.
Bruce Sentar‘s recently completed Ard’s Oath series starts out much better than I thought it would. Aside from some believability issues with the whole mage/anchor thing the first book ends up quite entertaining. The second is not. The second is, in fact, atrocious. For whatever inane reason all the setup for the royal family is retconned and they’re instead presented as cartoonishly evil one-note villains. The only reason I continued beyond it was due to the hope there’d be some kind of justification for this character assassination… but none was ever provided. Although on the positive side of things any future appearances from them are either brief or focus on their failures.
As for the remaining novels, my only other complaints would be the conflation of nicknames and pet names in relation to the goddesses (painfully juvenile) and that the last novel feels more like a meandering epilogue than a series finale. Overall what enjoying this series comes down to is whether or not you find the character interactions engaging enough to put up with the questionable setting and host of rabidly self-destructive antagonists with tissue-thin characterization.